In the early 1970s, Robert Altman devoted himself to a number of films that took a widely recognized dramatic trope and dragged it forcibly down to earth. In 1971's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, this meant assembling a western out of dirty, scary, lonely found moments antithetical to the sweeping drama of John Ford. In 1973's The Long Goodbye, this meant creating a private-eye-driven film noir fueled not by artful shadows and snappy dialogue but by tedium, inarticulateness, sudden violence, and pervasive moral rot. Bouncing off our notions of what a western or film noir is, Altman filled out his genre-film forms with vast, idiosyncratic realism, dragging us into the minute-by-minute existence of a world we might otherwise be tempted to treat as a dramatic archetype.
A similar trick is at play in Love Is Strange, the latest work by filmmaker Ira Sachs, who made a splash in the independent-cinema world with 2012's Keep the Lights On. In Love Is Strange, Sachs's story is set in motion by a ripped-from-the-headlines event that could've been parlayed into a by-the-numbers drama: After marrying his same-sex partner of several decades, a sixtysomething teacher is fired from his job at a Catholic high school. But instead of the predictable procession of righteous backlash, courtroom showdowns, and learning and growing, Sachs's film does what people usually do when shitty stuff happens: Pick up the pieces and move on.
With the instigating antigay firing out of the way in the first 10 minutes of the film, Love Is Strange is free to track the minutiae of the lives of its protagonists, the married couple portrayed authentically by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, who are cast into a scary new world. After the firing, the men are unable to keep their long-standing apartment, and soon find themselves temporarily but terrifyingly homeless. In the film's iffiest plot device, the couple is split up between friends and relatives, with Lithgow's Ben taken in by his married-with-a-kid nephew and Molina's George shacking up with friendly neighbors (a pair of party-loving gay cops, oy).
But then things get really interesting. In pacing his film, Sachs alternates between languorous scenes of life being lived and lyrical jumps forward in time, which allow for major plot points to be announced via small conversation. It's similar to the way Richard Linklater moves his Boyhood, but Sachs is even bolder in his deployment of ellipses, steering his characters into discussions of the Big Stuff—the meaning of life, artistic ambition, fidelity—without ever making a scene.
The heart of the film is rightly our old-man newlyweds, but they're surrounded by a complicated world of family that Sachs and his actors capture beautifully. As Lithgow's niece-in-law and shelter-giver, Marisa Tomei gives another of the lovely and intelligent supporting performances that will retroactively earn her the Oscar many still resent her for, and young Charlie Tahan, as Lithgow's grandnephew, ably carries a good chunk of the film's emotional weight on his shoulders.
Some will say that "not much happens" in Love Is Strange, but the sense of stasis is a ruse. Huge things happen. It just looks like normal life. 
